Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/110

 LETTEE I.

FEOM RIO DE JANEIRO TO MONTE VIDi^O.

Monte Video, August 11, 1868.

My dear Z J

You directed me, remember, to proceed

straight to the seat of war, in the " seld seen land,^^ Paraguay, and there to constitute myself your " Military Correspondent" You were weary of reading for more than three years a succession of reliable details published by one newspaper and directly contradicted by another. You pitied the public when I was asked for articles upon that interesting if not important subject by a certain Editor who, knowing me to be at Santos, Sao Paulo, inferred that places and persons distant a thousand miles or so, were therefore necessarily familiar to me. You asked with P. Pilate " What is truth ? " You were " dying " to know something about that unspoiled Arcadia which deaf Mr. Mansfield, after a ten-months^ sojourn on the soil, pronounced to be the " most interesting, loveliest, plea- santest country in the world -" about the " Nestor of the war,^^ Marshal Caxias; about Madame Lynch; about the battles and the massacres, and the rumours of massacres, and remembering the ladies of Sienna in the Livre de Montluc, about the Amazonian army whose " uniform was white, with white-fringed caps ; their arms a lance with pennant, and their grades eflfeminized into Commandanta, Capi- tana, Alfereza, Sargenta."

To hear was to obey. I at once girded up my loins for the task. With a stoicism not less rare than commendable.